Thursday, April 14, 2011

The Five Pillars

Since about two years I am talking about the Five Pillars, it's a little like "back to the roots".

I wanted to write down my thoughts about the Five Pillars for quite some time, but never felt to be calm enough to do so. The reason for this is mainly outside of Wikimedia, mostly because of very intensive work days and the wish to spend more time with my man at the weekends.

Now I simply decided that this is an important issue and I will simply have time for these essays.

In this first post I would like to sketch the overall relations between the Five Pillars before I break down into every of the Five.

When Wikipedia was started there were no rules, no processes. There were only the Five Pillars. These are the principles upon which Wikipedia was based. But I think with some adoptation they are also principles for all Wikimedia Projects. So I will handle the Five Pillars as if they are not only the Five Pillars of Wikipedia, but the Five Pillars of all Wikimedia projects.

From a general view, every of these Five Pillars are equally important. There is not one which is most important, without any one of them our project would get a totally different character. All these Pillars are also not independant. They are tightly interrelated. If we change one, we will change them all, because we will change their internal relations, and we will change our projects as a whole, in a fundamental way.

The first Pillar frames the scope, purpose and content of every of our projects. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free media content, Wikibooks is a collection for text books, and so on and so on. Every project have such a scope statement or should have one. It gives every project its identity, its meaning of existence.

The second Pillar defines our position in the world. The humanity is a trimendous diverse and complicated entity. It is full of friendship but also full of conflicts. It is full of similarities and full of differences. The statement of neutrality, or in the case of Wikiversity, the disclosure of the point of view, put our projects outside of every of the conflicting parties and ideologies, but it is also a statement of openness. It states that everyone, every party, every ideology, has its place inside of our projects, every of them can be presented inside of our projects.

The third Pillar declares the purpose of our projects. Why are we doing all these works what we are doing. Although there were, are and would perhaps always be conspiration theories about sell out of Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects, this will never happen, because it is in one of the fundamentals of our projects, exactly in this pillar: We do all this for free, and it should remain free.

The fourth Pillar is about our internal organization. A wiki is an interactive tool. By interactive it does not mean interactive between the server (machine) and human, but interactivity between human beings. This pillar tells us how we should interact within our projects. It emphasizes the collaborative nature of our projects. This collaborative nature is at the end what made our projects great, not the combative behavior that sometimes we see, sorrowfully.

The last Pillar reminds us not to forget any of the other four pillars. If any of the other four pillars got overwhelming, began to supress the rest, it calls us for action, to change our rules so that a balance is resetted again. It reminds us on the changing nature of our projects, it appalls on one of our human nature: the nature of exploration, never to stay at one place and think that one had already arrived the end of the world. It calls for the vitality of our projects and everyone of us, to invent, to try new things, to welcome new people, to make new friends.